Rethinking the Mentor

My recent reading binge has been neo-Victorian fiction and Gaslamp Fantasy. With hundreds of such titles around it’s hard material to avoid. Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield, The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg, The Glass Sentence by S.E. Grove, The Illusionists by Rosie Thomas, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street by Natasha Pulley. I’m sure you can add to the list.

What gives these novels their appeal is not only Victorian quaintness but, often, their focus on and elevation of elements sure to please the reading public: birds, books, secret gardens, clocks, maps, dresses, balloon travel and so on. Charm and intrigue are helpful to include without a doubt, but what explains the popularity of this fiction is not the same thing as what makes it work narratively.

Often in reading this stuff, I run across a story element the utility of which is overlooked; indeed, which is by many estimates primary to story structure. That element is the character we call the mentor.

The mentor archetype is one we tend to associate with epics, perhaps because of its origins in Homer’s The Odyssey. Mentes was the person whom Odysseus put in charge of his household when he left for Troy. The goddess Athena assumes his form to guide young Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, in seeking news of his long-absent father. The mentor archetype is a principle figure in the Hero’s Journey, and is lucidly discussed in my pal Chris Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, his distillation for storytellers of Joseph Campbell’s work.

A mentor in the simplest definition of the word is a wise and trusted advisor. Gandolf. Yoda. The Fairy Godmother. Alfred (think Batman). There are dark mentors, too. Haymitch (The Hunger Games). Durzo Blint (The Way of Shadows). Mentors can be comic, fallen, forgotten, absent, multiple or dead. Whatever the case, the mentor’s role is to inspire, energize, instruct and guide the protagonist. Mentors give gifts and reflect the protagonist’s highest aspirations. Mentors are the voice of the Devine.

Mentorship is also a primary principle in business. There are many books on the topic, which illuminate for us ways in which mentors can help employees become more productive, creative and effective. Mentors in business are present and connected, patient with those not yet ready to learn or change, ready to push a protégé when the time is right, instruct by example, and ask the critical question “What have you learned?”

Thus, we tend to think of mentors mostly in terms of their teaching relationships to protagonists. However, there are others to whom mentors are important, and for whom they do more than teach. Indeed, there is a whole group, equally important to authors, who are positively affected by mentors.

Readers.

In the dynamics of storytelling, mentors serve hidden purposes. First, mentors are the solution to a storytelling dilemma: How can you get readers to feel for, if not cheer for, a protagonist who is flawed? Especially when a protagonist doesn’t immediately show us innate goodness, by saving the cat let’s say, or who for a time at least must remain dark, tormented, outcast or victimized, it’s asking a lot of readers to bond with characters who show us very little reason to care.

Here is where the mentor comes in. The mentor makes it okay for the protagonist to be naïve, restless, rebellious, broken, hemmed in, self-defeating, cynical, foolish, or in any other way a person who’s hard to like. When a mentor believes in such a character it’s a signal to us that it’s okay for us to have hope. The mentor’s faith and vision tells us to wait and anticipate. We care because the mentor believes.

Mentors explain things and set goals, naturally, but their knowledge and far-sightedness also lets us know that the author is equally far-sighted and in control of the story. We can relax. Someone’s in charge. Someone knows what’s going on and what’s going to happen. The mentor’s mere presence assures us that things ultimately are going to come out okay, albeit not easily.

Mentors can be constructed of cardboard, of course, so it’s important to be sure they are also human. Mentors don’t have to be older. They don’t have to be perfect. They can have their own blind spots, agendas, foibles, or shortcomings. They don’t have to die. There are many clever ways to introduce mentors into stories and I wish authors were more creative in doing so.

Here are some prompts toward creating, or developing, mentor figures in your story:

Is there a character whose attitude toward your protagonist can be goading, amused, challenging or only ambiguously supportive; for example, lending assistance only reluctantly or with conditions? Why does this character secretly care?

What does your mentor want and need from your protagonist that your protagonist is unable to give or is incapable of giving?

What about your mentor causes your protagonist to resist him or her? How does your mentor make learning difficult? In what way is your mentor a poor or incomplete teacher?

How is your mentor able to push your protagonist in a way that no one else can?

How will your protagonist greatly disappoint your mentor? Work backwards, make that the way in which your mentor most strongly hopes your protagonist will grow or change.

At the end of the story we probably can say what your protagonist has learned from your mentor, but what has your mentor learned from your protagonist?

There’s more to mentors than meets the eye. Who is the mentor figure in your story and how are you making he or she different than expected?

Comments

Spot-on as usual Donald. I love me some mentor: the MC of my current novel-set (Solemn Judgement) is as taciturn as his name implies, plus a foreigner, so his mentor (Cedrith) is vital to our view of him. Not only that, Cedrith is the only person in the entire land who LIKES Solemn. I believe that later, when the two part company, you can still feel empathy for my quiet, driven young paladin as only seen through more hostile eyes, because Cedrith knew him first, and brought the reader knowledge of his courage and goodness. What a marvelous theme to discuss! I also note that stories can have partial mentors, whose training function is just a small or temporary part of their impact. Several times in the Narnia series, one of the children serves as “tour guide” for another.

So, I have an interesting dilemma with regard to the mentor archetype. I’m in the brainstorming/outlining stage of the fourth novel in a series. The first three novels had a fairly complete arc for my protagonist. In the fourth novel, the hinted-at dark past of one of the characters who played the mentor role in the last two books comes back to haunt her. It’s a bit of a turnabout to have my series protagonist help someone else with that person’s dark past. It’s sort of a pay-it-forward that furthers his redemption character arc.

I realize, reading your post, that my series protagonist has put on the mentor hat. His former mentor has basically sealed her past mistakes in a metaphorical vault rather than confronting them in light of day. Raven, having dealt with his own dark past head-on, is the perfect person to help her work through it.

Do think this change can work from a story perspective and do you have any ideas/suggestions for making it happen?

My main character dislikes her pushy intimidating mentor from the start. Likewise, the mentor finds her potential ‘mentee’ lacking in discipline. But their hidden agendas force them to overlook those things, and they go forward with a mutual tolerance for one another. Their relationship is one of my favorite parts of the story to write because its so full of conflicting emotions. There’s an aspect to the mentor-mentee dynamic where the student must recognize that it’s time to step away from the teacher. That doesn’t happen in this book, but the seeds are planted. Its an aspect of mentorship that fascinates me because of it’s complexity. You’ve fired my synapses as usual this morning! Thank you.

That’s what I was getting at, thank you. The mentor-protégé relationship can be troubled, maybe even involve friction in a humorous way. Sounds like you’re right on target.

BTW, I’ve struggled with that terms “mentee”, which is correct and proper usage, but it does sound to me like a candy you buy in a theater and then unwrap with a loud crinkle during the show to annoy other theatergoers.

Don, in my new book Greylock I have a mentor. Initially he had specific goals to achieve in the story with the main character. Some of these goals though became suspicious along the way. It turned out that he had his own storyline. Total surprise to me, but it worked well by the end of the story. I was reading something the other day that there are too many male mentors in our fiction and that we need more female mentors. Do you think our modern literature needs more women mentors?

I see plenty of women mentors…in women’s fiction. Male authors ought to get a clue.

That said, there are many tired mentor tropes. The prostitute with the heart of gold. Wise and astute children. The homeless guy who dispenses sage advice. Morgan Freeman in pretty much every film role he gets.

You see what I mean. It’s not just about gender, it’s about being creative and surprising us.

Thank you for this thoughtful post on mentors. I have the usual mentors — parents, teachers, older friends — but sometimes they show up in unexpected ways and this I love. When I was writing an exploratory draft, I didn’t realize one of my antagonists (a mentally disabled woman) was a mentor until my MC does. It was such a beautiful realization, that someone who is traditionally looked down upon as a person with very little value has wisdom to impart. It’s a small moment but the consequences reverberate throughout the book. My own views about mentally disabled people changed as I wrote this book.

Don– I confess to resisting complimenting you, because so many others heap you with praise. But your post today demands praise. It’s a remarkably compressed, useful analysis of a role that is fundamental to a great deal of storytelling. I happen to think a mentor lurks somewhere, in some form, in almost every extended narrative.

You ask us to talk about the mentors in our stories, and how we make them “different than expected.” I have two in the novel I’m just finishing, one positive, one negative. Both are old and wise.

The man’s in his late eighties, a “legend in the nursing home business.” He is shrewd, twinkly, avuncular, and corrupt. He mentors a young Mexican in how to succeed in business, but his only focus is on profit. Ultimately, he betrays his disciple.

The other mentor is also wise. She’s wheelchair-bound with multiple sclerosis, in her sixties. She comes to the aid of two friends who are lovers, by guiding them to see things about themselves that have blinded them to the choices they’ve been making. She could be called a tough-love specialist.

Only the first, negative mentor actually surprises the reader: his ultimate betrayal of his young protégé is meant to come as a surprise, but also to be seen as wholly consistent with his character. As for the woman, she surprises those she guides, but not the reader. She is a voice of reason and insight, capable of seeing what her two friends can’t.

Barry, no wait a minute…why can’t the wheelchair-bound woman in her with multiple sclerosis surprise us?

Maybe the reason she’s guiding the two young lovers is an entirely selfish one. Maybe she misses something important about their relationship, an issue that nearly wrecks their romance but which they then solve on their own. Maybe its the mentor who learns something.

The novel I’m working on now began as a mentor/protege story, but pretty quickly the relationship got more complex than that and I eventually realized that the teacher is the real protagonist of the story. It is he whose transformation drives the plot. The protege is simply the instigator of his transformation and the viewpoint character through whose eyes the reader can care about this rather difficult and secretive person. Interesting how these archetypes can lead elsewhere.

Don – You’ve made me realize something. I knew that my secondary MC (my primary protagonist’s guardian) considers her seeress grandmother to be her mentor, but that it was actually her (somewhat manipulative) queen. What I’m just realizing, particularly looking at the arc for the entire story, is that the manipulative queen is actually the mentor for the protagonist, too. She pushes my MC out into the world to “do his thing,” but always with her own version of her higher ideals (read: her agenda) forged into his thinking as she does so. She tells him exactly where to go and what to do, yet leaves him considering it all his own thinking and doing. Again and again, it’s the ways that he strays from her stealthy advice that become the makings of his turmoil. The queen even slyly wields her two pupils’ (/pawns’) attraction to each other as a tool. So, ah-ha! A bi-mentorship situation. This deserves some exploration this morning.

I’ve sent a cuppa joe your way as a token of my gratitude, and I’ve poured a new one for myself for the brewing session you’ve inspired. Thanks for your generous mentorship, Don!

I do have a secondary character that in some ways is the thorn in the side, but in doing so reveals a different POV to the MC. They might butt heads, but underneath that she is there for my MC. I am giving some thoughts to expanding her role and considering the elements you mention in this post. Thanks, Don.

I think mentors appeal to readers because everyone has a fantasy of an ideal parent figure who’s wise, powerful, and unconditionally supportive. But paradoxically, fictional mentors who deliver the fantasy are boring. Perfect Mufasa types are beloved by children, but in adolescence people start to realize that authority figures aren’t infallible, and their relationships to parents and teachers become more complex.

The most interesting fictional mentor I can think of is Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. He’s nuts and enjoys torturing Clarice Starling psychologically, but narratively, he’s her mentor. He guides her professionally and pushes her personally to overcome her weaknesses and fulfill her potential. He’s like a very twisted, sadistic father figure.

So much to chew on in light of my story, here. I love good mentor characters, but I realize that the MC in my WIP is rather mentor-less at this point. Partly that’s because she’s the lone female scientist in her lab, and most of the other scientists view her as a rival rather than someone to encourage. She’s isolated on lots of social levels and without guidance or support (things she tries to believe she doesn’t need), so she makes mistakes–partly out of ignorance, partly out of stubbornness. She will do it herself, thank you very much, said the little red hen.

But your questions help me to think of where she *does* find her mentors. She has two friends that serve the role in various ways. (Oscar-winning movie notwithstanding, I like David Corbett’s definition of the revenant, a character who reflects things back to the MC.) And her potential new employer offers the possibility of a better professional mentor in her future.

I think there’s a lot here in your questions to consider and expand what I’ve got so far. Thank you!

I printed this article out and then ripped the pages into small pieces and ate them all, hoping the words will give my writing the nutritional boost it needs. (Just kidding, I actually stitched the pages together and now use them for bed sheets. We all know osmosis is real).

Thank you, Don!! You’re constant and timely insight is spot on. (Also, every time I read an article by you I have an overwhelming desire to quit my day job and just write, write, write.)

Don, have you seen Whiplash? If not, I suspect you’d enjoy it. The screenplay authors, with help of a stellar performance by AK Simmons, who is more sadistic drill sergeant than music teacher, conflate the mentor and antagonist roles. Also, it invites the question about whether traditional mentors or allies–the protagonist’s father and girlfriend, in this case–are helpful or antagonist forces in their own right. (Their support can be viewed as enabling the protagonist to retreat from the pursuit of excellence.) Among other things, it’s an indictment of the medals-for-participation mentality.

I think I need to watch it again. I feel a column coming on. ;)

Anyway, thanks for this. As with most of your columns, I discover I have more work to do.

Oh yes, loved “Whiplash” and not just because I used to play jazz drums. AK Simmons was amazing and totally deserved his supporting actor Oscar.

What I loved about the film is that it kept us guessing, right up until the final shot, about whether Simmons’s character was truly a mentor or just a sadist. In a sense the story was almost less about the protagonist and more about his teacher. Certainly the subject was their relationship.

Agreed! And the line that defined his role as mentor (when it finally came) was devastating in it’s accuracy: “There are no two words in the English language more harmful than “good job”.

As a mom of musician kids, I’ve used that line on them many times. So when he said it, it killed me.

Confession: I think about that line when I write. I still have a long way to go to become the writer I want to be, but whenever I judge a bit of my writing as “good,” I say, “Now make it great.” (And weirdly, that statement comes out in your voice, Don…)

Great post on the value of mentors in storytelling, Donald. It definitely made me think about the way I mentor writers myself. You touch on what is irreplaceable about a good mentor when you say ‘How is your mentor able to push your protagonist in a way that no one else can?’ Have shared.

Hello, Don. I’m the unknown, home grown, shadow cornered note taker who, tonight, must thank you for providing sparks of wisdom in your nonfiction books and each writerly post you–the invisibilia Mentoris–wrote here on WU, for me and other provincials who endure the dearth of local mentors. My thanks and best wishes to you. ECM, writing as Stella Sluuki.

So sorry to come in so late to this discussion, but I was traveling and then buried in the tasks of returning home, etc.

As I’ve noted before, I’ve been resistant to the Campbell bandwagon because I’ve seen his ideas (and Jung’s) grossly over-simplified with an almost lockstep adherence that trivializes its importance.

Christopher Vogler did an excellent job avoiding this, but one still hears lesser minds chattering away with cliched misunderstanding of the mythic underpinning of story. (For example, virtually no one ever notes that Campbell himself, in The Masks of God, calls on creative artists to no longer look back at the archetypes of the past but instead to forge new ones.)

That said, the mentor is a particularly valuable character precisely for the reasons you note. I generally divide secondary characters into two main (and not mutually exclusive) categories: those who assist the protagonist on his inner or outer journey, and those who impede or resist his forward progress. As you wisely note, mentors can reside in both camps. (The domineering and doctrinaire creative writing teacher, for example.)

But the other thing I think a mentor provides is similar to what a love interest can provide: access to the internal struggle of the hero to define himself. The mentor creates a mirror or sounding board as the hero is challenged to answer key questions: Who am I? Why am I doing this? What way of life do I want to defend, what is my moral compass, what kind of person do I hope to be?

In fact, the mentor figure in my last novel was indeed the love interest, who forced the hero to recognize why he was so obsessed with helping the young woman he was trying to “save.” Only when he “got it” was he in fact able to overcome the girl’s resistance to what she sensed as “do-gooder” self-congratulation.

Handled badly, this can degenerate into bumper-sticker slogans and pedestrian self-help advice.

But one way to avoid this is to root the guidance in the relationship. Make whatever lesson needs to be imparted a central facet of the growing bond between the characters. Get the mentor out from behind the lectern. Make his tutoring not just an exhibition of knowledge, but a testament of faith and affection.

I can think of three examples in three different W.I.P.s I have going, all fantasy/scifi in this case:

In Swevenfall I have a layered mentor approach where characters all have influence over one another. The six-year-old black girl is a mentor to the rough washed-up rockstar who’s a mentor to the angel who can’t speak, who’s an intercessor for the dreamweaver from another world, who’s a mentor to the little girl. They’re all teaching each other through dreams because (1) not all dreams are created equal and (2) dreams are no respector of persons.

The main character in my short story The Blimps of Venus is a nudist aristocrat who has a very old clothed serf that turns out to be his dad. They bicker a lot, but the aristocrat learns a ton from the bickering.

And in this graphic novel script I’m working on, the MC is a 70-year-old grandmother that stumbles on a magical artifact and learns how to use it from a 19-year-old coked-out singer songwriter in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

In every case, it’s the voice of wisdom speaking into ignorance or the arrogance of knowledge. Wisdom as in “wholeness” or “the experience of having done something good in a specific set of circumstance.”

What an interesting twist on mentors, Don! I like how you do that. Throw a stick in the spokes and jam up the works, turn the bicycle upside down on the street.

I just wanted to add that mentors are very often secondary characters who act as foils to the protagonist. They reveal much of what’s good about the protag and give the reader/viewer a reason to root for them. This allows the writer to create a protagonist with a lot of flaws…in other words, create loads of fun for a writer. Well, at least for me. :)

Thank you for the piece. It was an excellent and well-thought piece of writing. I’m from Sydney, Australia and I am doing a thesis on the absence of mentors and how it affects the narrative desire. You mention how effective it is to have a mentor character within the story but what is your thought of not having a mentor? And how this would effect the protagonists journey? One of my key texts is ‘The Neverending Story’ (the book). If you know any more please discuss this with me :) Doug.